Elle Macpherson and breast cancer

[Mooguru]

3 hours ago, LunaFreya said:

One thing I saw in a Netflix documentary was cancer patients being offered aromatherapy to try to get them to relax and possibly take less painkillers. The patients were free to refuse and it was not being offered instead of painkillers or any kind other kind of therapy or medication, but this is how I’d prefer “natural therapies” to be used. Of course, provided they don’t interfere with current medication as there’s some sort of strange assumption that they don’t to the point where people won’t tell doctors about what else they’re taking.

There's benefits to open mindedness on both sides because we all only know what we know now. Medical staff being open to listening to patients and having open discussions are more likely to have better relationships where patients don't feel they need to lie or hide or be adversarial as the only way they can look into alternate therapies. And maybe sometimes they'll find things that'll help others in a: "There's no research behind this but some patients have found doing xyz made them feel more comfortable" way. 

DS was always incredibly active. The medical staff were very strong in pushing how important rest was and were openly anti exercise post chemo,  "he's just had chemo, you shouldn't go for a walk, he needs to rest" etc etc. But DS was like nope, no way, we're going out. I've got things to do, people! And we just did what he wanted against the recommendations and everyone kind of shifted to "yeah that's just DS's way". But every now and then someone who didn't know us would be horrified and tell us we had to let him rest.  As the months wore on everyone kept commenting that he was tolerating the high intensity chemo better than any child they'd ever seen before. And they discussed him in international panels so not just one ward, we're talking kids around the world getting that protocol.

Anyway a while after DS died, research started coming out about the benefits of exercise during chemo in reducing side effects. So the very thing medical staff were warning us against doing is probably the reason he tolerated chemo as well as he did. I'm just glad we listened to DS more than we listened to the professionals on that topic.